As it is well-known, as a high-tech traffic technology such as an electronic control and communications and traffic information are developed and applied to traffic facilities, a vehicular transportation system is evolving into an information transportation system (ITS) that represents a traffic system whose operation and management become automatic and scientific and which improves the efficiency and safety of the transportation.
In particular, through the use of a vehicle communications technology such as inter vehicle communications and communications between a vehicle and a roadside device, the vehicular transportation system is evolving for enhancing the driving safety and providing a driver with a convenient service, thereby achieving effects of reducing a traffic accident and enhancing the traffic efficiency. A notable example thereof is the group driving of vehicles using the ITS.
This conventional group driving is managed by grouping a plurality of unspecified vehicles that is moving in the same direction, allowing the vehicles to exchange information therebetween, and implementing the group driving of the vehicles based on the exchanged information.
Since, however, the conventional group driving method is performed on unspecified vehicles, it is difficult to secure reliability between vehicles participating in the group driving by the absence of authentication for the vehicles. In addition, there is a problem of exposing privacy of the vehicles participating in the group driving.